Bluejay
by catherwauling
Summary: A lab rat, a vagrant, a killer. Bluejay is no hero. Just a branch caught in a raging stream. She will bend before she breaks—but she will break. It's only a question of when. (Starts several years before Avengers, fiddles in bits and starts from MCU canon. Major and minor pairings throughout. Includes femslash.)
1. A Smile from Bleeding Lips

_A lab rat, a vagrant, a killer. Bluejay is no hero. Just a branch caught in a raging stream. She will bend before she breaks—but she will break. It's only a question of when._

**AN:** Story begins several years before _Avengers_, dips into _Iron Man _for a bit, and dabbles with characters from _Agents of SHIELD_. Diverges from MCU canon in fits and starts, but keeps to major events. Multiple pairings, both major and minor (including femslash) though romance is a third genre. Primary focus on the OC and integration into canon events. Written in first person throughout; I might later post drabbles from different POVs on my Tumblr.

Warning: adult themes throughout. M rating. I don't own anything other than OCs.

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><p><strong>Chapter One:<strong> "A Smile from Bleeding Lips"

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><p>There are scars on my body that will never heal. They are an ironic aberration in my already unnatural physiology. Cut open my skin, and the blood you wipe away will be the only memory of an already bygone wound. Shoot me with a bullet, and watch my flesh knit together; put me through a scanner, and see the bullet dissolve as my eyes turn black and my blood boils. Break a bone—if you can—and hear it snap back together. It is no pleasant sound.<p>

But whether you hurt me or leave me be, my oldest wounds will not mend. The jagged trench of a cut that runs across my face will never close; neither will the marks down my back, through a breast; in an X just below my stomach. My left arm will never grow back: a crater of dead flesh and metal stirs where it should rest.

Wounds inflicted before that turning point in adolescence. Before hell turned into something worse.

Jemma says that these wounds are like dead skin that my body won't reject. With tentative eyes she asks me if I'd be open for "exploratory surgery"—cut through the scars to see if new flesh emerges. I stop speaking for a day, sending her looks of apology to mirror her stumbling "I'm so sorry." My tongue sometimes falls silent outside of my own volition. The fingernails of my right hand digging into my thigh are a deliberate action.

Tasha says my wounds are marks in my ledger. Reminders the rest of my body can no longer keep. For her, red in her ledger is something to wipe out. For me, (she says,) these marks are meant to be treasured. My sole hope for my implausible mortality.

(She is an assassin: mortality is something to be valued.)

(I am a survivor: mortality is something to live through.)

Clint cracks a joke while reading one of his paperbacks. Creases on the spine. Coffee stains on the pages. It's a cliché for scars to mark one's history. (Says the marksman with a bow and a quiver of trick arrows.) Though, "some women find scars attractive." His tone is laced with insinuation that I purposefully ignore.

Whatever meaning I find in my old scars, I find more of a meaning in my lack of new ones. (In the divide between what was and what is.) There is a significance to this that is not lost on me: the tangibility of my past; the impermanence of my present.

If my body is a ledger, it stopped recording years ago.

I toy with my robotic arm every week or so, perhaps to compensate. With my earliest models, I'd have to oil and clean the parts, tighten their joints and screws, replace the slapdash coverings that served as poor protection from the elements (as well as fists, knives, gravel, pavement at eighty miles per hour). Even though I've since moved past my younger prototypes, I still meddle. My left arm is the only part of me that is changeable.

I also keep journals—handwritten, with ink that I can smudge on my fingers, and paper I can stain and dog-ear and tear. If I can no longer wear my history on my body, I will write it on something fragile.

(History is meant to be a fragile thing.)

I am currently in a motel room in Calgary, Alberta. Snow flurries have blanketed the skies for days. The cold stings, like little buzzards, but too many layers and I feel choked. Jemma says that I have no ideal weather, due to my peculiar senses. I will always feel the temperature, just as I always hear heartbeats, or see the lines in people's faces where others see smooth skin. White noise I can't quite tune out, but at some point have become familiar with. (Silence, I think, will be a disturbing thing to witness.)

(I use the cold as a poor excuse to stay cooped up and write for a few days. I have better excuses in mind, but they are like cards in my hand I refuse to play despite the rules of the game.)

I think I have been here before. This place used to be on the outskirts of the city before the construction boom. What used to be a rest stop on the border between the metropolis and the countryside is now the lifeblood of suburbs—a strip mall here, an auto repair shop there, and a lone run-down motel with a busted "NO" on its neon VACANCY sign.

Flashes come back to me here. The snowfall triggers a memory of burning my fingers on hot chocolate spilled from a paper cup. A thermal coat that isn't stiflingly warm. Earmuffs over a wiry pair of headphones connected to an old Walkman that might have been modern at the time. Mountains barely visible in the distance. A destination in mind, or a place from which to return: loose swimwear and steam fogging up glasses at a hot spring crowded by bodies in the frigid air.

I have been here before. Before the Bunker took my memories, among countless other things. Before the twisted lies and half-truths of my body bound me in a hell of cement and operating tables and latex gloves.

Before they took my name, and gave me a number instead.

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><p>I took Naomi's name from her body and left her to rot with little more than cardboard and stones to cover her under the bridge. (I say I took her name, though it is also true that she gave it to me: handed me her old state ID with an outdated photo that could pass as a younger me.)<p>

("Waste not, want not," she said. "That's a lie. I want a lot. But at least you won't waste this.")

I knew little of her past outside of what she told me, which was even less. Her father was an upper-middle class drunkard who could live with his addiction "comfortably" in the Bronx. He'd given her a roof over her head, scraps on the table, and a collection of cuts and bruises he'd "kiss better" when sober, but still cruel. (She would fall silent after spitting out his name, and her heart would beat faster, almost lighter, for a whisper of a moment. Partly out of a remembered fear. Partly out of something else.)

She said nothing of her mother. (Her mother was gone or dead and done.)

She had crashed with "friends" (said in a bitter voice) for as much as she could until each and every one "threw her out on her ass" (this hurt her more than she'd ever let herself know). Between finishing what she could of high school and "getting the hell out of dodge", she chose the latter without hesitation (half a lie).

Naomi Yi was a vagrant girl that few people would miss. She'd cut her threads to her history and floated free in the wind (sank under the weight of the river, she couldn't swim). She died with few prospects and less money to her name. There were no pictures on milk cartons. No "Missing" pamphlets stapled to telephone poles or handed out by teenagers after school on safer streets.

She was, in other words, the perfect skin for me to slip into, and she knew it. (I try to tell myself that that's the only reason she gave me her name. It was practical.)

(Waste not.)

(Keep on wanting anyways.)

I celebrated (commemorated) my 17th birthday (hers only in my mind) with a pack of cigarettes I swiped from a tall man with a cut on his chin who sat too close to me on the bus. It was easier to fill my lungs with smoke knowing that they'll never remember the damage I tried to do to them. The nicotine kept off the cold (the temperature, among other things).

I started to introduce myself as Naomi. The clerk at the public library called me Miss Yi. Spoke to me in Korean before I shook my head and pretended I didn't know the language. A stocky, short-haired white man who had an apartment I wanted and body parts in his walk-in closet tried to call me "Mimi". I dumped his corpse at a nearby construction site where they would build an office for a supplies company atop his remains.

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><p>For a blessed year, I remained anonymous, and free.<p>

I "settled down" in my apartment, throwing out the furniture that played hell with my back in favor of a bedroll and a small fold-out table I could use cross-legged on the floor.

I lined one wall with trinkets both bought and stolen. A Japanese lucky cat bigger than my head I'd bartered from a little girl at her mother's store. An unfinished painting of a woman's face I found in a derelict warehouse with a bloodstain on the rear of the canvas. A colourful, if flimsy set of plastic drawers filled with little plastic figurines and jewellery I would never wear. Speakers lifted from an electronics store and carted out the backdoor, playing music from a clunky old laptop at a "low" volume. A rolling hanger with clothes I liked to look at, but were too impractical for me to wear. (Too noticeable, inflexible—too memorable; flower patterns and bright colours and fabric that could catch and tear.) Stacks of books (half of them "borrowed" from the library with a stolen card), mostly paperbacks from the YA section I never got to read at the Bunker.

I moved on from stuffing trash bags with paper plates to washing Tupperware in the kitchen sink; started to use plastic utensils rather than my hand and pace myself with food. Learned how not to get canned food to explode in the beat-up microwave (stir frequently; also, do not heat metal). How to fry eggs in different ways and use oils to prevent scraping off burnt food from the saucepan. How to cut apples into slices and the best way to peel different fruits. A hundred little things I did not know (the Bunker told me I did not need to know).

I got used to sleeping through the night. Nightmares would still shake me from sleep as easily as the cacophony of traffic and the girl next door's crying after sex. Something as small as a fly buzzing about the room would shock me from the chafe of rough clasps down my right arm, the blinding white lights shone into my eyes, the clamps keeping my chest from healing shut as rubber fingers poked and prodded and studied black bones. Months of restlessness finally gave way to fitful sleeps and forgotten dreams. (I would still wake up tired and sweating, but to the light of the morning crescendoing through the uneven blinds.)

I learned the names and faces of the others in the building. Marc, the landlord, with an unexpectedly gentle face and little agility due to a pot-belly. Sarah, the neighbour with tattered blond hair that went through a string of "bad" lovers and one day showed me how to put a condom on a half-eaten cucumber. Bruce, a middle-aged man with wiry glasses that walked with a limp and constantly eyed my armless sleeve. Clementine, the thirty-something widower with a "girl's name" who told me I was beautiful without lust in his voice. Stephie, a "very Chinese" third-generation girl who spoke broken Mandarin and shared smokes with me on the building's roof.

Piece by piece, I built a patchwork life from myself, and held it together with petty theft and a night shift at a corner store owned by a Persian family that didn't ask questions. (Sunk weeks into collages of newspaper clippings and printouts from the workstations at the library, finding a rhythm between the mundane crests and troughs, spaces where the Bunker bled through and pooled like a furtively hidden reservoir.)

(That was the quiet thing, the secret thing, like drugs to a naïve homeless girl scraping out a living away from her drunkard father under a bridge. Like the _ding _of Marc's microwave dinners at two in the morning, or Sarah's more pleasant dates, the ones that bring her flowers. Like Stephie's envelopes of fresh bills from her "businessman" of an uncle.)

Public records said they were retired doctors, recently-graduated researchers, or visiting practitioners. They had few, if any, connections to one another, each as thin as a spider's thread. Many were in New York; a few had spread out over the East Coast; one had fled to Florida. I suspect a number of them left the country: the ones I couldn't find, the names in footnotes or the faces obscured in group photos—those that knew how to hide and stay hidden.

I found the ones that I could. Traced my own web on the walls of my apartment with marker and staples, tacks and string. Took absences from my job at the corner store, which I likely held onto out of the owner's pity for my missing arm and sunken cheeks. Became familiar with routes in and out of the city. How to pickpocket itineraries and board a later bus with the same old story.

Clementine taught me about justice: an eye for an eye keeps other eyes in their sockets and births a smile from bleeding lips. He was convinced his older sister had pushed his depressed spouse over the edge into suicide. He gripped the bread knife at family dinners with the wish to drive it into his own leg and mark his sister, who always sat next to him, with his guilty red. He'd torn himself from his roots and moved east to New York to lose himself in a mass of people who couldn't care less. His sister had died in a car accident that killed her instantly and left him with a knot in his chest he couldn't untie (his fingers were always shivering). He learned justice from the lack of it and spoke of it drunk, with salt on his tongue.

Back then, I only had fingers on one hand. The metal arm the Bunker made me was flexible enough for mundane tasks, but lacked finesse. Its hand had three claws that could grasp and pierce but little else. Untying knots took teeth and effort and broken fingernails.

Untying knots took daylong trips outside the city and arriving in unfamiliar towns in the cover of night. It took subway rides deep into Manhattan, or cycling through streets in Queens on a lifted bike I would trash in a dumpster in a different neighbourhood. Scouting apartments, suburban homes, motel rooms paid by the month. Listening with inhuman ears and seeing with inhuman eyes. The rhythms of a post-life as regular as the heartbeat of a girl in a dreamless sleep.

It took learning how to clean blood and hide bodies. Again, with the hundred little things I never could've learned at the Bunker. The weight of an elderly man with a beer belly. The stinging stench of fresh decay. The cloying matting of the tongue with suppressed nausea, an overload of the senses. Wiping browning red off of different surfaces. Wearing something to keep loose strands of hair from falling. Cleaning my metal arm with Clorox wipes and rubbing it dry with my fingers.

It took an orange pop and a cigarette per trip, on the roof of my apartment, sometimes with Stephie as she crumbled bread for the birds. (I wondered if pigeons hurt from inhaling cigarette smoke. I wondered if it would affect the chirp of bluejays like it laced Stephie's throat with worn velvet.)

On New Year's Eve, I let Stephie into my apartment. The walls were newly bare, the knots in my chest unwoven into dangling strings. We streamed the countdown from my laptop (which was on its last legs) as she told me about the celebrities that were hosting the event. Pop culture magazines were her guilty pleasure, a secret shared as if in exchange for letting her in the door. We ate popcorn seasoned with cinnamon ("Terrible idea", she said, and stuck her tongue out, "next time, try shredded cheese") and I had my first shot of alcohol, cheap vodka she got from a college party and abandoned in the recesses of her fridge. She called me a lightweight as I rested my dizzy weight on her shoulder. Held my head in sweaty palms as the countdown neared zero, inching closer in tremors, looking like she'd lose me.

(We kissed one night, and a week after, Marc found her dead in the alley with a bullet shot through the back of her skull.)

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><p>Coulson later told me how they found me: damaged footage from a recording, a trail of dead doctors with secret records, and the investigation into the murder of a twenty-two year old college dropout named Stephanie Zhang.<p>

The footage was taken from a camera with a bird's eye view of an operating room in the Bunker. Just under a minute of recording was fully recovered from the damaged data. It showed a one-armed teenage girl strapped to an autopsy table—a metal slab with a drain at the foot. Her chest was cut apart and held open by metal clamps. Two figures in surgical wear prodded at the unusual organs and the sleek-black bones, taking samples, watching as flesh and organs knit back together whenever they took a slice. Blood poured from her body and pooled on the metal, tracing her bound legs and slipping down the drain. As the figures worked, she convulsed, her screams gagged through a mouth guard, eyes open and alert and terrified.

One of the figures dug deep into her wildly pumping heart, and the girl's back arched through her bonds. Her eyes—whites and all—clouded black, and the figures withdrew their hands, shouting as darkening blood burned through their gloves and ate away at their fingers. The metal clamps started to dissolve, jagged ribs reforming to their proper shape—

—and something sharp flashed from the girl's sole forearm, tearing through the restraints and obscuring itself in the stomach of the figure to her right. The man collapsed into static.

He was later identified as Dr. Jeremy Irving, the youngest sibling in a family of government workers with roots in Maine. For four years, both his paper and electronic trails went dark, before re-emerging as a John Doe by a fishing trawler off the northern East Coast.

In 2008, connections began to emerge between Dr. Irving and a number of others with backgrounds in various medical and scientific fields. Each had a four-year long stretch in the black. Each were either declared missing or found dead by New Year's Eve.

And in the early weeks of 2009, a girl with the name and ID of a cremated corpse came up in an NYPD murder investigation. Her details were logged on the senior detective's digitized case files, in which he noted an unusual scar on the face of a one-armed girl.


	2. Fingernails Drumming on Gunmetal

**AN: **Shorter chapter because I am terrible at pacing.

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><p><strong>Chapter Two:<strong> "Fingernails Drumming on Gunmetal"

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><p>I had a year of freedom, in which I grew reckless. In which I'd spend evenings with headphones over my ears with fast music to drown out the constant static of the cityscape. In which I'd sink into the bathtub turning showers into baths, cramped in the small imitation porcelain even at my short height, toying at the water. In which I'd put on the identity of Naomi Yi like a skin my body never quite had, and grew comfortable. Grew used to evening shifts at the corner store eyeballing whether a customer buying a handle of vodka was underage.<p>

(I still took precautions. Kept a vertical deadbolt on the door. Busted the ladder down the fire escape outside the windows. Locked the windows. Kept the blinds shuttered. Used a proxy to go on the web. Always paid with cash. Kept a combat knife I lifted from a pawn shop stabbed into the floorboards next to my pillow. Wrapped a strip of cloth into a makeshift armband covering my conspicuously discoloured right forearm.)

(Not enough. In the end, not enough.)

I hadn't heard the footsteps echo through the stairwell over my headphones. Only when I took them off did I hear three tense heartbeats and the _click _of a safety just outside the front door. No time to make a plan, pack my things, or even put on a jacket over my tank top and boots to cover my bare feet.

The deadbolt bought me a few seconds. The locks on the windows cost me those same seconds. I broke through the window using my metal arm. Leapt outside just as the door broke with a _crack _and thundering voices began to charge.

"Peters, fire escape on the south side!"

I leapt over to the neighbouring roof, tearing my arm and knees. I scrambled up and ran to the entrance to the building's stairwell, crying out in frustration at finding it securely locked.

I kicked it once, twice, and flinched as the men fired warning shots.

The door slammed inward on the third kick, and I barreled through and leapt down the stairs.

I made it to the second floor before I heard a rush of footsteps coming from below. Breathing frantically, I searched the hallway, straining my hearing to find pockets of silence behind the doors. The wail of an infant, the whirring of a microwave, the click-clack of typing (like fingernails drumming on gunmetal).

I found no sounds other than the hum of a fridge coming from 2E. I kicked the door (once, twice) open, and hurried inside.

Blue wallpaper and light hardwood. The smell of red wine put to air. Landscape photographs hanging in the hallway. The absence of faces in the frames.

I stepped quickly but quietly through the apartment, trying to control my breathing so I could hear the men coming past the clamor of my heart and the surrounding din. I hoped that they would rush through the stairwell before searching the floors from top to bottom; I could already hear them ascending past this floor onto the next.

I collapsed against a wall to catch my breath, gritting through the slowly dulling pain in my arm and legs. I didn't have the time to wipe off the blood; I needed to get out of the building and out of the neighbourhood. Out of the damn city, as far as I was concerned.

No time to think beyond the moment. Adrenaline narrowed my vision and honed my instincts to a single command: _Run._

I opened a window and looked down into the alley below. There was a closed dumpster that could break my fall better than the asphalt. I leapt down, nearly stumbling, but catching my balance and climbing down onto the street. Ran left out the sole exit before realizing my mistake.

A man in a suit with slicked back hair was standing to the side of a black van, one hand already reaching into his jacket.

"This is Peters! Target is coming out the back—"

I tackled him as hard as I could, causing him to bash his head against the van and collapse. I hesitated for a brief second before leaving the gun, with nowhere to hide it on my person. I was already conspicuous enough as it was, bleeding and bare-foot in January.

The next hour was a nightmare, trying to stay out of sight in crowded Queens with my senses as amplified as I'd had them for years. My ears rang with maladjustment as my feet throbbed with rapidly ripping and mending skin. Sometimes I heard the murmurs, gasps, and shouts before I heard footsteps and idle speech, bursting into view like a deer into headlights before scampering again into the shadows. The rapidly fading sun was a precious thing, but the cover of night came with the many-headed bites of freezing air.

I knocked out a middle-aged man at a park to steal his coat, gloves, and wallet, and coped with the overlarge shoes that hung at my feet. I managed to find my way to a bus headed to Boston picking up passengers at a makeshift terminal on the side of the street. The driver, an aging, rail-like man with dull eyes, gave me a curious look as I fumbled taking out the money for a ticket on the half-empty bus.

I collapsed into an empty seat near the back, the rushing chemicals throughout my body struggling against my rapid stillness. My thoughts were a scattered deck of cards I couldn't put back together. My left sleeve felt vulnerably empty.

I stayed in that state of shock for half the trip, before realization finally dawned. I had lived through a year of freedom, and now that year was gone.

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><p>In my intake interview (not the interrogation, that came a while before) Coulson asked me if the Bunker trained me. I thought he meant to ask whether they gave me an education—and they did, of a sort. Good behaviour was rewarded with books. One of the guards, a woman in her thirties with deep skin and dreadlocks, helped me through a math book like a tutor. Some of the trials they ran involved memory retention, cognition tests, mental maps, and the like; they ran them several times a month. They were like a breath of air before the plunge back into dark water.<p>

Of course, he didn't mean that.

"Did they teach you how to steal?"

A dead girl whose name I stole taught me that. The daily clenching of my dry stomach and the irregularity of my periods taught me that. The ease of slipping my fingers into someone's pocket without them noticing, the small thrill of little forbidden things. Eating restaurant-cooked food for the first time across a dead girl's smile.

"Did they teach you how to survive on the street?"

Trial and error taught me that. Freezing into a blackout and emerging in a wood with a freshly healing wound on my forearm. Watching a soon-to-be-nameless girl OD before my eyes while I did nothing. The cold steel of a knife in my gut upon being mugged and things going to shit. Running from a dead girl's dealer across a rooftop and meeting an hour in the black on the pavement.

"Did they teach you how to dodge surveillance?"

Fear taught me that. Fear of being strapped to a metal table and opened up while conscious because neither sedatives nor painkillers quite worked with my biology. Of being dragged by a choker (a collar, a leash) across the hard floor through the hallways back to my cell for "resisting". Harsh and fearful glares, a hand always at the waist, grasping weapons in holsters like prayer beads or crucifixes. Dispassionate eyes wielding a scalpel. Pity murmured by the odd surgeon on her first day. Booted footsteps near the door after lights-out and off the record punishments.

"Did they teach you how to kill?"

Nobody (could have) taught me that.

The first (conscious) time was raw and cold and still.

If they had taught me, wouldn't they have warned me that I might enjoy it? (Like unravelling a knot in my veins, cool and calm, with salt on the tongue.)

"Did they teach you how to evade capture?"

Three long months of being hunted taught me that. (It taught me I hadn't learned enough.)

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><p>I slept in motels when I could. Other times, I broke into empty houses, and slept like a thin wire that would snap awake at the sound of night traffic. I'd steal clothes and little memorabilia I could carry with me, like a plastic daisy, a fountain pen, earbuds in the shape of yellow hearts.<p>

Other times, I slept on the streets.

What I couldn't fit in a duffle bag of clothes and chip bags and cash, I left behind. Whatever was too heavy to carry while running (extra shoes, a laptop, more than a few bottles of water or cans of food) I trashed or bartered or abandoned. Whatever was too conspicuous for me to hold (a gun, a large knife), whatever could be traced (a pickpocketed smartphone, debit cards) were never picked up.

I breathed and slept and woke and ran with only one goal in mind. The only goal I had left to me, after I realized I could never be safe, never for long. It clattered in my ears like a rude bell and shocked my nerves like a thunderstorm, whenever I saw stiffed-back men or women in suits, whenever I saw a large van on the road.

The Bunker gave me codes and numbers and nightmares (I could no longer keep them at bay, I remembered every one). I didn't know if I could die (die and stay dead) but I knew that I could kill.

I would never be caged again.

(So I swore. And so I made a promise to be broken.)

Twice more, I saw the suits, the vans. Red beads refracted by the motel room window tearing through the dark like the bullets that followed. (I broke an agent's arm and stabbed another in the neck, before falling out of sight into the trees.) A chase through a parking garage, running up and over and scrambling across, skinned knees and torn jeans and a broken metal arm I abandoned for junk. To the roof like the birds that flocked to Stephie's bread as we shared a smoke and a sunset.

A jump one could only make if they knew the fall wouldn't kill them. (Four stories up I knew to keep limp and not land on my head. As long as I was conscious I could get away and heal. As it was, I had to drag my broken body with one arm into the shadows and hide until I could use my legs again.)

In the end, cold and exhaustion did what men with guns couldn't. They found me in an abandoned shell of a building that had once been peopled by vagrants. Rumors had spread that the place was haunted by a girl who would die overnight only to find a pulse the mid-morning after. A one-armed ghost from the borderland between life and death. I was collapsed in a corner wrapped in thin blankets, clutching my duffel. My lips were blue and my eyes didn't move. Someone had left an arrangement of flowering weeds next to me; another had put beads into my hand as if to ward off my restless spirit. An empty sleeve fluttered in the wind.

I awoke, incoherent, with my ankles chained and my arm bound against my chest, to the prickle of steam on my lips from a thermos of hot chocolate. I was in the inside of a moving van. In front of me, holding up the drink, was a balding man with tired skin and a taut, but gentle voice.

"My name is Phil Coulson," he said. "I'm glad you're alive."


	3. A Slow Dancing Lightbulb on a Chain

**AN:** Please review!

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><p><strong>Chapter 3:<strong> "A Slow Dancing Lightbulb on a Chain"

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><p>It was a drop of kindness that kept me from breaking as I was escorted down the steps. The still-warm throb of hot chocolate on the back of my tongue. A distraction from the chains around my ankles, the modified straitjacket that bound my arm, and the absence of windows in a place I suspected was mainly underground.<p>

I remembered little of the ride there, having woken in fits and starts as a woman injected nutrients into my malnourished blood. A harsh stop in traffic causing me to fall and crack my head. The wide-eyed stare of the woman as she watched the cut mend. Sips from a thermos held up by the man with the gentle voice—Coulson. He cradled the back of my head as he brought the container to my lips.

Four guards surrounded me as points on a square. Each armed and padded with body armor, sweat slick through black fabric in a confused but wary alertness. I was brought into a room and secured to a chair in front of a metal table. Across from me was a mirrored window; above me, a slow dancing lightbulb on a chain.

I hadn't seen my own reflection in a while. Hadn't had the mind to really study it, to try to see what others saw. (Too much running in too short a time, in too cold a weather, with quickly thinning blood.) I thought I could make out what the guards could see: a teenager late in her adolescence but still small, a cripple with a loose sleeve, a scarred and freckled face, a mat of tangled black hair unevenly cut and little cared for, skin tight across bone.

A girl. (Bound and restrained, captured with effort, perhaps orders to shoot to kill if she tried to escape. Perhaps in the guards' minds: threat or no threat? Shoot in the leg, or through the head?)

They let me stew in there for a little more than an hour. (When you can hear your own heart beat as clearly as I can, you grow used to keeping your own time.) I kept my mind as blank as I could, knowing what would happen when I let the first bad thought in. No thoughts as to who had taken me. No thoughts as to where I was. No thoughts of what they would do. (When you sit frightened in a room with no other sounds but the hum of the lightbulb and the drip of a leak in the pipes, you sure damn well count the minutes pass by.)

The door grated open, and a man walked in.

He was a thirty-something man with cropped sandy hair and stubble on his cheeks. Wire-frame glasses clung to his nose, doing little to disguise the rings hanging heavy from his eyes. His tie was loose, his shirt had the top two buttons undone, and his suit was ruffled, as if he'd slept in it.

He slapped a folder down on the table, spilling out loose pages and photographs.

"Care to take a look?" he drawled, collapsing into his seat across from me.

I kept my eyes on him.

"Probably don't need to," he continued. "You've seen it all before."

The man leaned forward, shaking out the remaining contents of the folder. He glared down at them, his scowl showing teeth.

"Do you even remember their names?"

At this, I looked down. (A mistake.)

It took me a moment to realize what I was looking at. The photos jumped out first. Some of them were faces, portraits used for IDs, a number and a background away from a mugshot. Ice ran down my back as I recognized each and every one.

Others were autopsy photos. (Those, I definitely recognized.)

Doctors, researchers, guards. More men than women, most white and over forty. Nine autopsy photos, four picture IDs. Thirteen in all.

The staff from the Bunker. (Those I could find.)

The man drew out a report from the pile, and pushed it towards me.

"You look surprisingly spiffy for a pile of ash."

That's how I learned what happened to the real Naomi: her body had been found weeks after I left it, bloated by the weather and the water under the river. They'd identified her through her dental records and her father had arranged to cremate her remains.

No word on whether or not her ashes had been scattered, or where.

"Did you kill this one too?"

I glared at him. "T-that's a fucking lie."

(My throat was raw.)

"Pot, meet kettle."

"I didn't kill her." I insisted.

"How unlike you."

"You know nothing about me."

"Then enlighten me."

I withdrew again, keeping my head down, barely glancing at the other papers on the desk. (A list of items found at my old apartment. Statements from the neighbours. An arrest warrant for Clementine for obstruction. Injury reports from the motel attack in February.)

"You've racked up quite the body count, but you're a shit serial killer, you know that?" The man leaned back on his chair. "Hair and DNA all over the place. Security camera footage strewn about like candy. Did you think we wouldn't notice?"

(I thought that I could run. Then I got comfortable.)

"Tell me why we shouldn't just take you out back and shoot you."

I held my breath at that.

"Maybe you should."

I didn't know if they knew something I didn't. If they knew how to put me down and keep me under. If they could stop the haze from taking over, the glossing of my eyes; if they knew of bullets that wouldn't dissolve in my blackening blood.

(I thought of ways, over the years. Not because I was desperate to end my life, but because if you're like me you have to wonder what it would take to kill you. To know what to fear. Because aren't teenage girls meant to be afraid of dying?)

(All I could come up with were different ways of burying me alive. Straddling the edges of consciousness, in and out, like a ghost that doesn't know where to go.)

(Though I would prefer that, over the tables and knives.)

"That would be too good for you."

"Who are you to judge me?" I muttered.

"I'm Agent Daniels. Who are you?"

"Hopefully? The girl who s-snaps your neck while breaking out."

(I would have sounded more intimidating if my voice hadn't broken before I'd finished my sentence.)

"Then I'd be the second field agent you've killed this year."

"How many do I need to get a prize?" I choked.

"Surprise," he drawled. "You're already the winner—that's why you're here. Shall we throw you in a hole for the rest of your life now, or do you want to cry some more about it first?"

"F-_fuck_ you."

I winced as he stood, scraping his chair back with a volume anathema to my ears. He circled around until he was behind me, and pulled my head back by my hair, venom in his voice.

"I heard you got back up after falling from a four-story parking garage. Now that's just perfect, 'cause I've got a line of agents who want to beat the shit out of you waiting in the wings."

He flung my head forward.

"Disappoint us. Make this easy for yourself."

I bit down on my tongue.

Daniels stepped around me again. "Tell me your name. You know, the one you didn't steal from a runaway like some ghoul."

I shut my eyes.

"You aren't a fucking walking corpse. I'm not going to call you by a dead girl's name. Now tell me yours!"

I shook my head.

(Better to be obstinate than admit the truth.)

He slammed his hands on the table, making me jump.

"We aren't the cops. You aren't getting a lawyer, or a trial in some courthouse where you can see sun. This is the end of the road—_there is nothing more to hide. _So tell me your name!"

Loud gravel rumbling in my ears, makeshift drums from trash bins and rubbish with edges. (His voice hurt. Panic setting my senses haywire. Having my arm bound against my chest made me feel like I was throttling myself.)

I bit down harder, and my tongue started to bleed. I ignored the flush of wetness on my cheeks.

"Should I call in my friends? Should they go one at a time? I've got a redhead with a box of toys that would just _love _to meet you. Do you really think you're going to be able to keep anything from us?"

I ducked my head, and parted my lips. Blood started to dribble out of my lips. I didn't have to force a cough to splatter it down over my thighs.

"What?—Shit…" He stepped towards me, reaching to open my mouth.

(Stupid, stupid mistake.)

I bit down as viciously as I could on his fingers, throat tingling as he cried out. Blows rained on my head as I refused to let go; in the din I heard the door slam open and footfalls rush in. Another set of hands clawed open my mouth, roughly parting my jaw before I was pushed over to the side, overbalanced by the chair.

My head bashed against the table's edge before it smacked against the floor. Firecrackers rang out inside my eyes. A brief moment of black only lasted until the last man was out, slamming the door behind him.

A beat of quiet, before the light winked out and the room fell from sight. Only edges visible. Paper-thin light from the space beneath the door.

I sobbed out the sickly taste in my mouth, cradling my knees to my chest. (It hurt keeping the "bad" thoughts from burrowing into my head. I could already feel them biting, feasting away, gorging themselves fat on the many thin hands with which I tried to keep them at bay.) Better to be obstinate than admit the truth. (Better to eat his fingers than answer his questions, the loud man with the broken eyes.) Better to wash the taste of chocolate out with iron. (Comfort and cotton with wires and bleach and steel.)

Deep, broken breaths. Eyes clamped shut.

I rubbed my tears away by scraping them dry against the hard floor.

(Better they think me a ghoul than a number—the only name the Bunker had ever given me.)


	4. Singing Confessions Electric

**AN: **Please review!

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 4: <strong>"Singing Confessions Electric"

* * *

><p>When the dead girl died I stoppered the poisonous thoughts that threatened to burn through my mind. Focused on the little things first: combing the mats out of her hair and braiding it in the plait that she was always so sickeningly fond of. Straightening out the creases in her clothes, wiping away the worst of the dirt with my hand (doing little more than spreading it over the already colourless fabric). Folding her arms over her chest like I'd picture an undertaker doing were she in a mortuary and not under a bridge. Closing her fingers into loose fists, one by one, feeling them cool.<p>

It was the steady, strangely familiar motions that mattered, more so than the gruesome picture. Filling myself with step-by-steps like following a well-worn manual. Wondering when I'd stumble, when putting her _away _wouldn't feel so natural, like closing your eyes before you sleep, or curling into a blanket for warmth.

These were the scattered specks jumbling about my head (like ash on the wind after a fire).

(They kept me from breaking.)

Only later, when I had a roof over my head (cleaning out the body parts in the closet from the dead man's apartment) did I unstopper the cork.

(Regret, noun. A headache with a smell like bubbling acid on raw meat. Something you can wade through with your fingers, weeds of hair in greying bathwater. Clogged drainpipes and acid reflux into porcelain daydreams. An itemized list of your mistakes: (1) you did not ask her to stop; (2) you watched her like the white coats did to you, the ones you knew were behind the mirrored glass; (3) passed on paper bills into sweating fingers, something you'll remember every time you see (someone less than) a stranger crumbling bread for the birds; (4) you let her down with you; (5) you _led_ her down with you; (6) she would have listened to you if you asked her; (7) the stutter in her heartbeat wasn't all from the drugs. She meant more to you than she would ever admit.)

I took her name because I could not write it down in stone.

* * *

><p>There was a guard at the Bunker with a blind eye and pasty, milk-like skin. He would tap a rhythm on his legs as he walked that laced through the clamor of his boots like a song. He was the oldest among them, colour sapping from his hair month after year; he would run a hand through his curls and bite his lip whenever he felt irritated.<p>

The other guards called him Donovan. A flicker of a frown would pass through his features whenever he heard the name.

To me, he was the Music Man.

In the early days, of the ones I can remember, he would visit me during breaks in his shifts with an imitation of pity on his face. He had simple ham and lettuce sandwiches in white bread wrapped in plastic that he would share with me. Knowing, perhaps, how novel food with actual taste and texture would be to me; how strange it would be to see another eating with their hands.

Some nights he would bring with him a cheap red MP3 player half the size of his palm. Talked with me—at me—about old music few people listened to anymore. Told me how his niece had got him the player one Christmas, filled with the songs she knew he liked. Shared them with me by placing the earbuds on the floor, knowing how sensitive my hearing could be after a long day of tests. (He mouthed along to the lyrics, tapping his fingers on his legs. Running with a phantom of the melody in his mind.)

These were scraps, in the long run, offered to a dog from a high table with dirty fingers and a lie on the lips. But what memories I had of table settings and family dinners were few and far between—impressions upon impressions, blurred colours and shapes, smoke in my grasp.

And the absence of the typical cruelty, fear, or twisted lust in his eyes—

He was salt on the tongue.

(Those were the early days.)

Looking back, I think something happened with his niece. Some little thing turned in his head and sent tremors through his body until he wore it like a fabric, tight around the shoulders and heavy on the skin. His fingers grew violent at his sides, his footfalls sharp shots sounding down the halls.

He once laced the sandwich he offered me with glass, and stood in my cell as I bled out my throat in pieces. Taped earbuds to my ears and blasted searing noise from night to morning, when his shift ended. Wore a perfect imitation of guilt on his face as he removed them, wiping the red off my scrap of a shirt, and led me by the hand out my cell and down the hall for the morning's experiments.

(He was one of the staff from the Bunker I never did find. I'd like to think he died in his bed, tapping away at a rhythm only he could hear.)

* * *

><p>When they threw me into a dark, tight room and slammed the door behind me, I stoppered the poison and wrung my hand raw on the floor. Focused on the little things first. The scraping pain in my palm shooting up my arm, shivering my bones. My newly unbound ankles straining my feet awake from stillness. The gangly clamor of the ventilation ringing about the room.<p>

I slowly traced the edges of the room, fingertips and bloody knees for eyes in the absence of light. I found that the room was too narrow for me to lay down comfortably in all but one direction, perpendicular to the door. The floor was rough and uneven, pressing into my spine as I stretched out as best I could, trying to make sense of how high the ceiling was, and how large the vent.

(Too high, and not large enough.)

I listened for the tell-tale whir of motors, or the whim of circuits singing confessions electric to digital tape. Honed my sense of smell to filter out the air coming from the vents, trying and dreading to find a familiar scent. (The cold sting of sterile tools, the slow burning of disinfectant; bleached blood ground into old tile staining whites patchwork.) Listened to my breathing crash and echo in a simile of space and depth and shape.

Then—the distant flick of a switch.

A gunshot to my ears, and my world gone white.

It was a klaxon, or a recording of one, blaring past full volume and shredding my eardrums. I could feel hot fluid trickle out my ears and down my neck as I curled up into a ball, trying to keep the tremors off, already sensing a nightmarish haze crawl into my eyes.

A moment longer and I think I'd have broken.

When it all stopped, I found myself buried in a corner, shaking like a scared rat. I could almost feel the fissures running rampant in my skull. I spat something thick and dull out of my mouth.

(If my head was a bottle, I could feel it crack. Droplets of poison leaked through and started to smoke.)

_They knew, _I thought, as the angry man—Daniels—had said. "_There is nothing more to hide._" I heard some inhuman, naked thing squirm and scream inside. (I could barely hold her in. She was spilling through the fissures in thick suds.)

_They couldn't have it, _I lied to myself. _They couldn't have me. They couldn't have—_

I gripped my hair and pulled it tight. (Trying to cover the cracks in a bottle that threatened to burst. Glass-mender, corkscrew, packing tape girl on the third story of the old apartment. Weeds clogging the drainpipes like a dirty blessing from a drunk priest.) It felt like reading an old script, knowing it won't last: quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet—

Bullets to the sides of my head, pellets rattling inside my bones, the noise again, this time, with lights. (Or a synesthetic wound, two gaping maws where eyes and _sense _should be, starving raging—)

—Something breaks. Each time it repeats, for hours on end. A little more, a little more, a little more. (It is only after they stop completely that I feel the cooling slicks splattered on the wall like a macabre wallpaper meant for my touch. When they come for me, I barely register the look on their faces as they take in the state of the room. When they reach to pick me up, I offer them my hand.)

* * *

><p>I know firsthand how cold Tasha can be. How she can twist a knife in somebody's stomach with a flat face and a steady hand. How she can reach around a man's head and snap his neck as casually as she shakes a hand. Sometimes I could swear she smells like ice on metal, outdoors in winter; other times, like particulates of broken glass falling in still wind. (Sharp, piercing, tearing. Precision and violence in miniature.)<p>

My second mission with her, in Seoul, saw me handing her tools as she tortured a man in front of his wife. I stifled my shaking as best I could, though I doubt my reaction—flushed cheeks, wide eyes, teeth on my lips—went unnoticed.

Her movements were calculated and exacting, professional rather than visceral, experienced rather than instinctive. Within five minutes the man's wife gave up the location of the hostage exchange which Tasha radioed in to Strike Team Beta in Pusan; within another the woman confessed her husband's complicity in leading an NIS black ops division to their deaths.

I know firsthand how cold Tasha can be.

I also know how adept she is at reading others' temperatures, and using that against them. (How to turn a dying flame's want for heat into a long-lost love for winter air.)

* * *

><p>They took me to her, a woman wearing a soft, nearly whispered voice. A woman who had taken off her shoes so that her footfalls were like brushstrokes, and whose heart beat steadily and controlled (the gentle ticking of a watch on a thin, bare wrist).<p>

A woman with red hair and deliberacy in her movements. A balm on open wounds, applied to a body that'd long since stopped recording its losses into flesh.

She pressed water through my lips with bare hands and smooth glass. Dimmed the light with a switch until my eyes stopped burning. (Slow breathing. Eyes reaching; in them, a flicker of recognition, a flag purposefully thrown over tall stone battlements, before being withdrawn.)

Then she asked me for my name, and I told her everything.


End file.
